I put the word ‘conversion’ into GOOGLE and got back 128 million hits! The top one thrilled me, it said: “convert just about anything to anything else.” For a moment there I thought I’d found the religious leader’s magic bullet…if only I could figure out a way to feed my congregation into that converter program! Then I noticed that it was talking about “weights, measures, calculators, converters” and the like. While coming across “covert just about anything to anything else” was oddly appropriate for today and it’s certainly a program, a feature that is designed to make one’s job easier. I’m afraid just not mine and, for that matter, not yours either. You see, all of us Christian types are confronted with the reality of conversion. What the program says it can do – “convert (change) just about anything to anything else” – is what you and I are called to do. We’re called to convert, to change into the people God made us to be.
During Lent we’ve looked at the human condition (searching) and God’s response (the covenant and grace). Today we look at our response and our response is – conversion. So the human response to our condition and God’s offer of covenant and grace is – conversion. Essentially what we have to do is go from being one thing – searching, in the dark, however one wants to describe it – to being something else. In the case of the Christian faith it has a great deal to do with our recovering our created destiny as children of God and then living accordingly. Let me explain a bit.
What we see in the Numbers reading is a people forgetting the appropriate response. God has offered covenant and grace bringing them out of literal bondage in Egypt and moving them toward the Promised Land. Now they’re out in the wilderness, encountering all sorts of difficulties and what do they immediately start to do – complain? I love the Yiddish word for complain, it’s KVETCH. Doesn’t it sound like complaining? They KVETCHED! When they were starving, God sent them “bread from heaven” (manna, which in Hebrew means “what is it?”). God even sent them quails and brought water from a rock. The people complain and complain – it becomes a pattern in the Hebrew Scriptures (one that we sometimes replicate, I’m afraid, but that’s grist for another sermon’s mill!) – and God does something to get their attention because they’re too busy kvetching.
The real theological point in this passage is that Moses wants the people to believe God, this is, to TRUST God. Moses isn’t interested in getting the people to assent to some doctrine about God. Rather, he wants the people to move on, to continue their pilgrimage and thus to achieve their destiny because they trust that God will keep the Divine promises. They don’t and that’s why those snakes – the word for the poisonous snakes here is seraph, which literally means ‘fiery’ – appear.
After encountering the snakes, the people come to their senses, approach Moses and say: “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” Moses prays and God instructs him to make a bronze serpent, mount it on a pole and by looking at it the people will be healed. Snakes were not always thought to be icky; they were originally identified with healing in ancient culture. The god Asclepius’ staff had a single twisted serpent, and the symbol for medical profession today, the caduceus, continues the tradition.
What we see here is an example of the flight from God, what the church Fathers called aversio a Deo, which marks the Biblical narrative from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the call of Abram and which keeps repeating itself in the story of Abram’s offspring: Israel. Here, as elsewhere the movement away from God becomes a turning toward God, a conversio ad Deum. As the people look to the serpent and heed the call in faith, they begin to trust God. They repent – they turn away from their former action – and move toward God. And here the snake becomes the symbol of healing in the same way that the victim lamb becomes the symbol of God’s passing over and in the same way that the Christ will be raised on the cross so that a symbol of torture and death becomes a symbol of hope and life and forgiveness. This is part of the conversion.
What is important for us to understand, however, is that we come to grace through faith. The people could have chosen to stay home in Egypt or to have gone back to it. It was only when they opened up to the gift of faith were they able to act upon grace. That's where we Christians get into trouble. We think that 'faith' and 'belief' are the same thing -- they're not. 'Believing' is something we can do purely through the strength of our own will and intellect. Belief can lead people to do some horrible things because they "believed" they were right. One can say that he or she 'believes' in God and still have no evidence of it in his or her life. The Israelites believed they were right to complain and distrust this God who may have freed them from bondage, but then had called them to walk a perilous road. My mother had an expression about being “snake-bit” when discovering the obvious, the Israelites needed a snake-bit experience to get them to move from belief to faith.
Nicodemus 'knew' -- 'believed' -- that Jesus "came from God," but he couldn't act on what he believed. He still had too many questions that weighed him down: "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" His sense of what was right, what he believed about the nature of the world got into the way of what God wanted to do for him in Jesus Christ. In fact, that's the case with most of us. We constantly want to make things more 'manageable,' more 'believable' so we set up all sorts of systems of belief to guarantee what we believe, what we know. We find ourselves outside the experience of grace; and the next thing we’re doing is substituting legalism – if I just do these things, follow these rules I’ll be ok – but legalism is no substitute, nor is magic. Looking on the snake wasn’t magic. Unfortunately some people even reduce faith to magic. Do you know where the word hocus pocus’ comes from? From the fact that most of the people going to Mass could hear was the priest mumbling. ‘Hoc est corpus meum;” which they heard was “hocus pocus.” The next thing you know, there was Jesus in the sacrament and the people thought it was magic – but it isn’t. The people were healed when they looked at the seraph because of their trust, not just because they looked – and that’s the point.
Moses believed that God had called him to lead Israel out of bondage but he didn't let it go at that. This is how the whole notion of "salvation by grace through faith" works. It's not enough to just say, "I believe" and there's an end to it. When Moses heard the call of God, he acted upon it. He may have been reluctant, made an excuse or two and tried to get out of the job more than once, but still he went to Pharaoh, did what God commanded and led the people in their journey to the Promised Land.
One of my strong convictions, you see, is that right belief -- orthodoxy -- gives birth to right actions -- orthopraxy. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy is dead, cold, lifeless. I think that's why so many people have trouble with the Christian faith . . . no, I think that's why they have trouble with the way the faith is practiced – or not practiced. Too many of us, 'believers,' aren't living what we're supposed to be about. We forget that God calls us into covenant relationship, which means we have a part to play too. If we’ve been through a conversion, if we’re being born again, then it is supposed to show in the way we live – concretely, in the way that we talk, act, conduct our business, raise our families. Being born again isn’t a tick-off point on the to-do list of life – it’s not on “The Bucket List” -- it’s a way of life; at least it is when we’ve made our response to God -- conversion.
Nicodemus wondered how one could be "born again" and Jesus told him that it came from "water and the Spirit." Nicodemus "knew" but he couldn't act on it until God in Christ had revealed the truth that it's not what we do, but what God does in us and enables us to do that matters. You see that is the whole point of Paul saying that we have nothing to boast about. Salvation, then, is more a process of growth and change than a simple moment of crisis. Salvation is our entering into the covenant relationship and then living as God would have us live, and modeled for us in Jesus Christ. John von Rohr summarizes the teaching of the great Puritan spiritual writer Richard Baxter on this issue in The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought:
However, in this lifelong process under the care of God's covenant there must be a faithful covenant-keeping in order to reach the promised goal. A dead faith, Baxter knew, does not justify; it must live through its works. So he could write: 'Our first faith is our Contract with Christ. . . . [But] all Contracts of such nature, do impose a necessity of performing what we consent to and promise, in order to [receive] the benefits. . . .Covenant-making may admit you, but it's the Covenant-keeping that must continue you in your privileges.' Thus, he added, 'Faith, Repentance, Love, Thankfulness, sincere Obedience, together with final Perseverance, do make up the Condition of our final Absolution in Judgement, and our eternal Glorification.'
Graham Standish, Presbyterian minister and spiritual writer, tells the story about an old man “who, while admiring the beautiful view off the edge of a cliff, stumbles and falls. Hurtling downward into the abyss, he flails with his arms, trying to grab at anything that might protect him from his certain death. With the ground rushing upward to meet him in a violent end, he manages to grab hold of a branch sticking out of a cliff wall. There he hangs, unable to save himself. The top is 100 feet up, while the bottom is 100 feet down.
He had never been a religious man, but with no one else to help him he begins to shout out into the canyon: ‘God! Are you out there? Help me! If you help me, I’ll do anything you ask!’ He hears only the sound of the wind swirling along the cliff wall. ‘God! You are the only one who can help me. Save me, and I’ll do whatever you want.’ Again, he hears nothing but silence. Just as he’s about to give up all hope, he hears a booming, thundering voice echo through the canyon. ‘Sure, sure that’s what they all say.’ ‘God? Is that you? I mean it, I’ll do anything you ask!’ ‘Are you sure you want me to save you?’ asks God. ‘Yes, I’ll do anything.’ ‘Anything?’ ‘Anything!’
Again, the man hears nothing but silence. Then he hears God say, ‘Okay, I’ll save you, but you must do exactly what I say.’ ‘Of course. You know I’ll do it. I’ll become a Christian. I’ll help the poor. I’ll go to church every Sunday.’ God says, ‘Here’s what I want you to do. Let go of the branch. If you let go of the branch, I’ll save you.’
The man thinks for a while. Then he looks up and shouts, ‘Is anybody else out there?’”[1]
When it comes to conversion – real conversion – most folks are the man hanging on to the tree limb. We want to be “good Christians,” we’ll promise God anything, we want to be “religious,” we just don’t want to change – not ourselves, our attitudes, nothing. We want to keep on being what we are and living how we live, but that’s not what God calls us to do or how God calls us to be.
Henry Blackaby, a Baptist minister and writer on faith, says that if we are going to follow God it means that there will be profound change, which will entail a crisis, a crisis of faith and action. He says: “’God’s invitation for you to work with God always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action. You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what God is doing.’ Blackaby is saying that if we walk the narrow path that God sets before us, it will require, first, that we grapple with our faith and with making it concrete in our lives. We will have doubts. We will be unsure. We will feel lost, and we will not be certain at times if what we are doing is truly what God wants. Our only option will be to keep going and to trust God.”[2]
It’s about trust. Conversion – “from anything to anything” – begins with trust. We acknowledge our condition. We acknowledge God’s response of covenant and grace and then we respond, by trusting that God will walk with us, will heal us, will give us what we need to be “born again” and that God will help us to live as children of light. Conversion implies that at the end of the process we’re different, that we’ve changed. Conversion begins when grace is activated through faith, but conversion is the process of a lifetime. It’s got to start somewhere, but it takes a lifetime. The joy is it’s grace, God is with us.
[1] From Discovering the Narrow Path, p. 13
[2] Standish, p. 13-14.